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Will Britain's Torture Investigation Help or Hurt the Cause of Justice?

The announcement yesterday by Britain’s Attorney General, Baroness Patricia Scotland, that London’s Metropolitan Police are investigating whether officials from the U.K.’s security service, MI5, colluded in the torture of the former Guantánamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed is welcome. It represents a big departure: the first time to date on either side of the Atlantic that civilian intelligence personnel, as opposed to low-level members of the military in places such as Abu Ghraib, have faced criminal sanction for alleged detainee abuse. But whatever its outcome, the case is going to leave big questions unanswered—among them the extent to which the British government, led by former prime minister Tony Blair, signed up to the full program of illegal detention, “extraordinary rendition,” and coercive interrogation methods promulgated by the United States in the months after 9/11.

Binyam Mohamed, whose case is described in my 2008 VF.com article “Tortured Reasoning,” was captured trying to leave Pakistan with a false passport in April 2002, the start of an almost seven-year odyssey which took him, at the behest of the C.I.A., to detention facilities in Pakistan, Morocco, Afghanistan, and finally Guantánamo. Along the way, as he told me in an interview after his return to Britain at the end of last month, he was beaten, deprived of sleep, suspended from his wrists for days, slashed with a scalpel, and forced to listen to The Eminem Show played at deafening volume 24 hours a day for a month while in total darkness. Documents he acquired as a result of legal proceedings in the United States suggest that MI5 officials either connived in, or at any rate knew about, some of his worst alleged treatment, and I imagine these will provide important leads for the police.

However, the new investigation is not unalloyed good news.

First, it may well prolong the suppression of the redacted sections of a British High Court opinion, which gives a summary of 42 classified C.I.A. documents. These, the court has said, provide details of what exactly did happen to Mohamed, and amount to admissions that he was indeed tortured or subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment. (See my February 2009 VF.com piece, “You Be the Judge.”) The British and American media are still fighting to persuade the court to allow publication, and a hearing is due next month. Thus far, to justify prolonging the censorship, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, has had to rely on the questionable argument that publication would cause incalculable damage to the U.K.’s intelligence-sharing relationship with America—even though the judges have stated that the redacted sections do not include any secret intelligence material, and even though the Obama administration supposedly has a rather different attitude toward torture than did its predecessor.

The police inquiry may hand Miliband a stronger legal weapon. Britain’s laws on what can be published in advance of any criminal trial, or even a possible criminal trial, verge on the draconian. Almost any detail about a suspect’s alleged role can be construed as prejudicing the outcome, and to publish such detail is to risk being found in contempt of court. Miliband might well be moved to argue that the redacted material could prejudice the fairness of possible trials involving officials from MI5, and that all argument on the matter must henceforth wait. Even if no one is eventually charged, resolution of the issue would probably take us well past the next U.K. election, which has to take place by June 2010.

Underlying this seems to be a troubling phenomenon: a reluctance in both Britain and America fully to come to terms with the abuses perpetrated by security and intelligence agencies in the “war on terror.” As Jane Mayer demonstrates in her book The Dark Side (Doubleday), it is now evident that the worst of these abuses flowed from decisions taken early on, at the highest policy levels; that there was, as the C.I.A.’s former counterterrorist chief, Cofer Black, put it, a shared belief that the only way to stop further mass casualty attacks was to “take the gloves off” when dealing with prisoners. Arguably, to repair the resulting moral damage requires big, public actions—if not trials of those at the top, then perhaps hearings along the lines of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. There is little sign of an appetite for anything resembling this. In Britain, publication of Binyam’s disclosures did lead some parliamentarians to call for a judicial inquiry into the full extent of the U.K.’s complicity in torture. But most of those who commented on blogs and media Web sites seemed to be concerned not with his treatment but with the fact that, although he is an Ethiopian citizen, albeit long resident in Britain, he has been allowed to stay in the country, instead of being deported.

This lack of outrage is already helping to save Miliband’s political career, and it may be helping the cover-up of crimes that go much further than the treatment of one individual. We already know that Britain allowed its Indian Ocean airbase on Diego Garcia to be used as a staging post for C.I.A. rendition flights. I personally have interviewed more than 10 former Guantánamo detainees, both U.K. citizens and residents such as Mohamed: all have alleged U.K. agency complicity in their illegal detention and alleged abusive treatment.

Tony Blair’s readiness to follow the Bush administration’s lead over Iraq has passed into history. How much did he and his government know about the dark side, and how far did they buy into it?